The Calculator has struck, capturing Huntress, Lady Blackhawk, and Dove, and launching what he believes to have been a fatal attack on Oracle. But Barbara Gordon is still kicking, still on the attack, and ready to change her entire world to save her friends.

I hope it’s not too big a spoiler to say that Babs doesn’t actually die in this issue (you would have heard the internet exploding), but Gail Simone does something very interesting. She’s addressed a problem I don’t think most of the readers really even noticed. Oracle, by becoming the 911 operator for the entire DCU, has kind of drifted away from the original concept of the character. She’s found an intriguing way here to get that particular genie back into the bottle, one that will have repercussions for the whole DC Universe, without having to resort to any sort of massive restructuring of the characters or continuity shoehorn. It’s simple, it works, and it changes the status quo of this title just enough to be interesting without changing what makes it tick. Brilliant.

Inaki Miranda is a new name to me – the artwork here is really just okay. The story is told cleanly and without any really confusing segments, but some of the generic henchmen look way too much like a certain mercenary from a certain other publisher, and when the Batman family makes their appearance at the end the look is a little off. Some of them – Dick Grayson in particular – look a bit too sharp, too angular. There’s a beautiful cover by Stanley Lau that helps boost the art score, though.